Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel

Year 3 Day 127

“The words the prophet utters are not offered as souvenirs. His speech to the people is not a reminiscence, a report, hearsay. The prophet not only conveys, he reveals. He almost does unto others what God does unto him. In speaking, the prophet reveals God. This is the marvel of the prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible. He does not prove or argue. The thought he has to convey is more than language can contain. Divine power bursts in his words. The authenticity of the prophet is in the Presence his words reveal.” (Essential Writings pg. 64)

Society conveys thoughts and ideas through words and we use our minds to ‘conquer’ our problems. We think we ‘know’ what the Bible says, we think can figure every thing out with our rational thinking, in fact, what doesn’t make sense, we tend to discard. Rabbi Heschel is reminding us that not everything is conveyable in language, our minds cannot comprehend, apprehend, nor convey all that is happening within us and in the world. The prophet comes to us with language that is, in ways, inadequate to express the ideas, the power, the path of living well and the path of return we desperately need to adopt and adapt to.

If we only read the prophet’s words, we can ignore the meaning and the power of them just like the Ancient Israelites and people of Ancient Judea did, just as people throughout the millennia have. Rabbi Heschel’s teaching above: “the thought he has to convey is more than language can contain” demands  we allow the words of the prophet to penetrate our souls, our inner lives. Yet, we continue to brace ourselves from allowing them into the core of being.

While there are many who ‘believe’ in God, who quote the prophet’s words, who maintain they are ‘religious’ and follow the dogma, these same people pray the words of prayers, read the words of scripture without letting them penetrate their inner life, without allowing them to change their thinking. We have become so enamored with our rational minds, we have forgotten the teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe: “Where do you find God…Wherever/whenever you let God in.” While there are many who proclaim to be ‘following the letter of the law’ in jurisprudence and in their religious life, these same people seem oblivious to the “divine power” that “bursts in his words” when reading, quoting, using the prophet’s words to prover their way is the only way. We are in desperate need of rearranging our ways of understanding the prophet’s words, the words of our Scriptures, the call of the people around us, and the cry of our inner life.

Rabbi Heschel is, once again, calling us to account in the nicest of ways, he is rebuking us for studying the prophet’s words for our own misuse of them. I hear him demand that we repair the errors of our ancestors and hear the prophet’s words without trying to think of how to abuse them for our own good and, instead, hear them with the “divine power” and use them to repair the spiritual maladies we suffer from and the ones we face each and every day. Rabbi Heschel is giving  us a path for return and repair through experiencing the words of the prophet rather than thinking we can fully understand them with our mind, that we can take in all they convey through language.

We need to return to the moments after crossing the Red Sea, the moments at Sinai, the moments of spiritual awakening, the moments of clarity/serenity we experience and turn them into stepping stones to a “richer and more meaningful life”. We, the people, have to throw off the yoke of Napoleon Hill’s: “what the mind can conceive, man can achieve”, we have to stop living as Descartes says: “I think, therefore I am”. We have to return to the words of the prophet and hear them through our inner life, through our souls. We have to be overwhelmed with the “divine power” that “bursts In his words” and use this power to overcome our rational minds automatic rejection of the prophet’s words, our rational minds automatic habit of reshaping the prophet’s words to fit its own scheme of things, to hear the words of the prophet and twist them to validate the dogma they want to follow and/or they want to use to have power over another(s). Our world is in desperate need of heeding the words of the prophet as well as appreciating the myriad of seconds, moments of spiritual awakening we have that we dismiss. Even people who acknowledge a moment of spiritual awakening often fail to realize the necessity to grow those moments, to engage in a spiritual discipline that causes the seeds planted in these moments to flourish through our nurturing of them, our engagement with them, our surrender to them.

These moments of spiritual awakening are the beginning of recovery for most of us, even those who say their conversion was not of an ecstatic nature. Every moment of clarity is a moment of spiritual awakening, a moment where our minds take second place to what our inner life is telling us. In recovery, we continue to “grow along spiritual lines” because we know that nothing else will help us recover our authentic self and repair the damage we have done internally and externally with our “stinking thinking”.

I continue to return to and grow these moments of spiritual awakening each day. One of the ways I do this is through studying and writing my awakenings of Rabbi Heschel’s teaching. Another way I do this is to constantly forgive those who have harmed me and ask for forgiveness from those I have harmed. Letting go of resentments and seeing the “divine power” in what transpires in my life gives me more freedom and joy each day. I continue to repair my errors, I continue to return to the words of the prophet so I can experience each day anew, each person I know anew, and have my rational mind be subservient to my “intuitive mind”, as Einstein teaches. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark